Danish Mosques – Significance, Use and Influence

The project PI is Brian Arly Jacobsen from University of Copenhagen. Kirstine Sinclair from University of Southern Denmark and Niels Valdemar Vinding from University of Copenhagen are participating partners in the project, and they are joined by Pernille Friis Jensen as PhD fellow with Brian as advisor. 

As framed in the project, mosques are not simply Muslim places of worship, but a complex contemporary socio-religious institution of the post-migratory Muslims in Denmark that are highly conflicted and contested in present day Denmark. They are products of infighting, power struggles and pragmatic negotiations internally amongst users, subgroups and leadership and externally with local, national and international agents, stakeholders and structures.

We propose to empirically explore the complex power forms and relations constituent to the mosque through initial contextualizing archival and case research followed by qualitative interviews with key informants and participant observation in the mosques in order to produce a multifaceted power diagnostics of the forces at play in and around Danish mosques. Thus, the purpose of this research project is to investigate the forms, rationales and relations of power associated with the perceptions, authority, positions, dynamics and counter-power of mosques in Denmark.